ANNEAR Front Cover 1 BLUE QUAY I, 2020 Oil on Canvas 1 150 X 120 Cms 59 X 47 ⁄4 Ins

ANNEAR front cover 1 BLUE QUAY I, 2020 oil on canvas 1 150 x 120 cms 59 x 47 ⁄4 ins 2 THREE BEATS IN A BAR V, 2020 pencil & ink on paper 7 7 18 x 25 cms 6 ⁄8 x 9 ⁄8 ins 3 THREE BEATS IN A BAR VII, 2020 pencil & ink on paper 7 7 18 x 25 cms 6 ⁄8 x 9 ⁄8 ins 5 MARITIME II, 2020 oil on canvas 4 THREE BEATS IN A BAR VI, 2020 3 1 101 x 80 cms 39 ⁄4 x 31 ⁄2 ins pencil & ink on paper 7 7 18 x 25 cms 6 ⁄8 x 9 ⁄8 ins ANNEAR EXHIBITION 2020 www.messums.com 6 MARITIME III, 2020 12 Bury Street, St James’s, London SW1Y 6AB oil on canvas 1 1 108 x 80 cms 42 ⁄2 x 31 ⁄2 ins Telephone: +44 (0)20 7287 4448 7 BLACK POLKA, 2020 oil on canvas 1 150 x 120 cms 59 x 47 ⁄4 ins Foreword It might at first seem odd to call Jeremy Annear a Surrealist, but it’s not a bad place to start. With titles like ‘Dream I,’ ‘Nocturnal Muse’ and ‘Harbour Moon III’, and with their mysterious evocation of place and mood, there’s a subtlety to these enigmatic, inviting paintings that speaks of a more distant and different world – like one glimpsed, half-darkly, in a mirror. It is exactly a century since the French poet André Breton began his experiments in ‘automatic writing’ that led him to the invention of what he called ‘Surrealism’. It would go on to become one of the most important literary and artistic movements of the twentieth century, embracing artists as diverse as Salvador Dali, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso and Paul Nash. And it’s fifty-three years since Annear – then a young student at Exeter College of Art – met Roland Penrose, one of Britain’s leading Surrealist artists, advocates and collectors. Breton 8 9 had died the previous year, and Penrose was in Exeter helping to curate ‘The Enchanted Domain’, a city-wide celebration of Surrealism. Participants included a number of other key figures in the British Surrealist movement – among them E.L.T. Mesens, Conroy Maddox and George Melly. Annear’s job was to help Penrose in hanging an exhibition of Surreal art. Even now, over half a century later, Annear’s recalls that experience with pleasure. But did its influence rub off on his art? He admits that he does see something of Surrealism in his early work, whilst collage – a significant Surrealist technique – has been something that has interested him greatly over the course of his career. 8 ENFOLDED, 2020 But at first glance Annear’s powerful current work must clearly be placed in the oil on canvas 3 7 great tradition of twentieth-century British abstraction. That movement had as 30 x 25 cms 11 ⁄4 x 9 ⁄8 ins its leading figure in this country the painter Ben Nicholson. He was no Surrealist – indeed, in the mid 1930s, when Nicholson was at the height of his powers, 9 MELODY I, 2020 oil on canvas Abstraction and Surrealism appeared entirely antithetical. Yet one of the key 3 7 30 x 25 cms 11 ⁄4 x 9 ⁄8 ins influences on young Nicholson had been the Cornish naïve artist, Alfred Wallis. Famously, Nicholson had run into the retired mariner outside his little terraced 10 SEMAPHORE III, 2020 house in the back streets of St Ives in 1928. Wallis was just the sort of untrained, oil on canvas 3 7 10 11 visionary ‘outsider’ artist the Surrealists liked to fête – in the way the Parisian 30 x 25 cms 11 ⁄4 x 9 ⁄8 ins Surrealists admired the self-taught tax collector, Henri Rousseau. 11 MELODY II, 2020 oil on canvas 3 7 30 x 25 cms 11 ⁄4 x 9 ⁄8 ins And it was family holidays in St Ives in the early 1960s that first led Annear to Modern European Art: it was exactly there as a teenager that he first knew he wanted to become a painter. Though Paul Nash had extolled the powerful potential of the ‘Seaside Surrealism’ he had discovered in the Dorset town of Swanage in the 1930s, St Ives offered a different mode of Modernity. This was definitely and definitively a town of Abstraction – witnessed in the presence of leading abstract artists such as Barbara Hepworth, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. The influence of the art being made by artists such as these was enough to draw Mark Rothko, the doyen of American Abstract Expressionism, to St Ives in the summer of 1959. As Rebecca Wright wrote in Studio International on the occasion of a Rothko exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in October 2011, Although the St Ives School has, at times, been presented as derivative of Abstract Expressionism, by exploring how American artists made the pilgrimage to St Ives to make contact with British artists this exhibition confounds any accusation of imitation. Instead, it reveals a collaborative dialogue in which artists from either side of the Atlantic are growing and learning together. It somewhat levels the geographic playing field, no longer pitting Abstract Expressionism as the dominant player, but presenting both groups as preoccupied with a similar endeavour. What Wright does not note, however, is that one of the influential spurs towards Abstract Expressionism had been Surrealism. The great American Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell was, first off, a Surrealist. And it was Motherwell who during World War Two encouraged a young Jackson Pollock to take lessons at the exiled Atelier 17, the famous Parisian printing school run by the English Surrealist, Stanley William Hayter (whose work Annear greatly admired, and who was a considerable influence upon him). The link between Abstraction and Surrealism was thus quite close (both historically and for Annear himself). Indeed, in 1940 Ben Nicholson used the phrase ‘abstract Surrealism’ to describe the work of his friend, Henry Moore, who was still exhibiting sculpture and drawings with the British Surrealists. But then, as Moore observed, ‘All good art, has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements – order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. Both sides of the artist’s personality must play their part …’ Thus in Annear’s work – as in Moore’s – we have a fruitful meeting of these two key Modernist movements. And one must always remember that the artist Annear most admires is Braque, the French artist he calls ‘my painting father – the highest influence’. 12 BLUE MELODY, 2020 oil on canvas 1 1 80 x 80 cms 31 ⁄2 x 31 ⁄2 ins So if Annear is an Abstract artist with a small debt to Surrealism, what are we to make of his relationship to landscape? Born in Exeter in 1949, and having moved from Devon to Cornwall in 1987, he is deeply rooted to the landscape of the West Country. But although he loves exploring the outdoor world, interestingly he does not really consider himself a landscape painter – or even a Romantic. He doesn’t feel like he analyses landscape, though place is still important to him: as he states, his paintings do make ‘odd connections between places and ideas.’ This comes out most clearly in works that – in their titles at least – clearly relate to very particular locations. Cameret-sur-Mer and Roscoff in the Finistére commune of Brittany, for example, are two places that inspired a number of 13 14 15 works in the current exhibition. Across the course of five visits to north-west France in 2019 he was deeply struck by the impression the Atlantic Ocean makes 13 ECLIPSE I, 2020 upon the coastline there. He explains that these works all ‘relate to harbours, oil on canvas 3 7 30 x 25 cms 11 ⁄4 x 9 ⁄8 ins to harbour structures and the large wrecked trawlers along the coastline, with their extraordinary colours and shapes often against a winter sky. I’m very fond 14 EARTH FLOW I, 2020 of Roscoff.’ Likewise, the ‘Siesta Song’ trilogy, with their rich, rust-coloured oil on canvas 3 7 browns, were inspired by a period spent painting in Spain, and suggest what he 30 x 25 cms 11 ⁄4 x 9 ⁄8 ins describes as ‘the reverie of after lunch wine and music.’ 15 ECLIPSE IV, 2020 When present in a landscape, Annear explains that he sees shapes, colours oil on canvas 3 7 and forms through the periphery of his vision, and that these might give him 30 x 25 cms 11 ⁄4 x 9 ⁄8 ins inspiration and ideas. But his work is neither narrative nor topographical, and despite the occasional references to particular locations, these are decidedly not 16 ECLIPSE II, 2020 paintings of places. All are painted at home in his studio in Cornwall, away from oil on canvas 3 7 30 x 25 cms 11 ⁄4 x 9 ⁄8 ins places of inspiration, where he searches for what he calls his ‘given language’ 16 17 18 and learns to speak it ‘as fluently as I can.’ He works in silence, but likes to play 17 ECLIPSE III, 2020 music between periods of painting. Jazz and chamber music are great passions oil on canvas 3 7 – something that, again, titles such as ‘Black Polka’, ‘Blue Melody’ or ‘Contra 30 x 25 cms 11 ⁄4 x 9 ⁄8 ins Tone’ reflect. But as he explains, he never has a particular title in mind whilst he’s working; these always come afterwards, with each finished work evoking a mood 18 HARBOUR MOON IV, 2020 oil on canvas when he looks at it, and inspiring the name he chooses to give to it.

Load more